In her much touted appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! tonight, former porn actress Stormy Daniels was by turns evasive, coy, combative, direct and once or twice flirty, seeming to deny signing the most recent public statement released under her name, suggesting that she couldn’t talk about her alleged affair with Donald Trump because of a non-disclosure agreement, and comparing her appearance with Kimmel to a horror show.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo just warned that the U.S. will retaliate against Russia if that nation attempts to interfere in this year’s midterm elections.

The warning came on Monday, in an interview with the BBC’s security correspondent, Gordon Corera.

Asked if he thought the Russians would target the midterms, Pompeo’s response was to the point.

“Of course, I have every expectation that they will continue to try and do that. But I’m confident that America will be able to have a free and fair election. That we’ll push back in a way that is sufficiently robust, that the impact they will have on our election won’t be that great.”

The operative words there are: “we’ll push back in a way that is sufficiently robust.”

Because that line strongly implies that the Trump administration has already made a decision to retaliate against any Russian effort to disrupt the election.

For a start, note that Pompeo’s is a declarative commitment: “we’ll push back,” instead of an equivocating “we can push back if necessary” etc.

If meant seriously, such a policy would have to be authorized at the highest levels of the government. After all, only Trump could order retaliation to a Russian cyberattack or any other form of interference. Indeed, even if Trump has chosen to defer to Pompeo on any possible response, he has at least made that decision.

Yet it’s also interesting that Pompeo used the words “sufficiently robust.” That language suggests a pretty aggressive counter-response to any Russian aggression.

What might this entail? In response to a query, the CIA told the Washington Examinerthat “we won’t be able to provide additional information beyond the Director’s remarks.” That said, we can make some educated guesses.

On Monday, McCabe left the FBI, following a meeting with FBI Director Christopher A. Wray in which they discussed the inspector general’s investigation, according to people familiar with the matter. Horowitz announced in January 2017 that he was examining the Justice Department’s handling of the Clinton investigation. His report is expected in the spring.

The matter of the Weiner laptop emails has been debated publicly for more than a year, in part because many Clinton supporters say the FBI tilted the 2016 race toward Donald Trump when it announced in late October that it was reopening its probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server when she served as secretary of state.

Key parts of what went into that decision have remained murky and are a major focus of the inspector general’s probe, according to people familiar with the matter.

In late September 2016, FBI agents in New York were investigating Weiner for possible Internet crimes involving a teenage girl. In the course of that probe, they discovered that his laptop contained thousands of work emails belonging to Weiner’s then-wife, Huma Abedin. Abedin was a longtime aide to Clinton, and agents wanted to know whether the emails in question might shed new light on the Clinton investigation, which had been closed in July without any charges.

The New York FBI office alerted FBI headquarters to the new email issue within days — accounts differ as to when precisely, but McCabe was aware of the matter by late September or early October at the latest, according to the people familiar with the matter. The agents on the Weiner case wanted to talk to the Clinton email investigators and see whether the messages were potentially important. Some people familiar with the matter said officials at FBI headquarters asked the New York agents to analyze the emails’ metadata — the sender, recipient and times of the messages — to see whether they seemed relevant to the closed probe.

McCabe was involved in those discussions, but there are differing accounts about how much then-FBI Director James B. Comey understood about the matter in the early days of October.